Scott Stinson: Ontario Liberals, NDP make 'pie in the sky' financial pledges while PCs vow to spend less

When Andrea Horwath put a stake through the heart of the surprisingly resilient minority Liberal government on Friday, the NDP leader accused Kathleen Wynne of having presented a big-spending budget that promised “the moon and the stars” as the government tried to outrun scandal.

A few hours later, the Premier warned voters that Ms. Horwath would make “reckless” financial pledges that amounted to “pie in the sky” economic “pipe dreams.”

Somewhere, Tim Hudak was no doubt nodding furiously.

As a six-week election campaign begins in earnest on Monday, there are many uncertainties about the three leaders and their parties that each have their own electoral baggage, but one central fact isn’t in dispute: The Liberals and NDP want to spend more, the PCs vow to spend less.

The big question, one that has been around for more than two years, is whether voters will buy into the Hudak message. It’s not hard to find public support for the general concepts of low taxes and small government — my God, even the pink ball of anger that was Rob Ford managed to ride such a simple idea to victory — but selling those concepts on the campaign trail, against opponents promising pie and the moon, could prove something else entirely.

The Premier has spent the early hours of the campaign selling her vision of a government that tries to be a “force for good” in the lives of the citizenry; that kind of sentiment is a big part of the reason why Ms. Wynne made an Ontario pension plan a centrepiece of the budget that just failed. Telling voters that they are on track to be short of money in retirement, and that the guiding hand of the Liberal government will help them out of that jam, is a message that Ms. Wynne seems to relish. It’s also clear that not only does she believe it, she believes it’s a winner. For all the efforts that the Liberals have made in recent months to tell the public that the pension plan is a necessary response to a real crisis, it remains that senior Liberals have admitted that the pension plan became the party’s central plank because it tests well with voters. The new-taxes-for-transit plan that Ms. Wynne once championed does not.

Oddly, the focus on pensions has also meant that the Premier spent the weekend answering questions about not Ms. Horwath nor Mr. Hudak, but Stephen Harper. After the Prime Minister on Friday called the proposed Ontario pension a payroll tax, Ms. Wynne said he should “stay out of the way” if his government wasn’t interested in expanding the Canada Pension Plan. There was a certain irony in Ms. Wynne asking the federal government to mind its own business since the Premier and her Finance Minister haven’t missed many opportunities to bash the Harper Conservatives as unwilling partners in prosperity in recent months. The May 1 budget dedicated a chapter to “federal underfunding” of Ontario, and the Premier had barely announced the June 12 vote on Friday when she used part of her prepared remarks to veer into an attack on Ottawa.

Knowing that Mr. Harper is rarely happier than when presented with the chance to express his disdain for Liberals such as Ms. Wynne, that sets up the Ontario campaign as a possible proxy war for the next federal election. Justin Trudeau and Ms. Wynne have already campaigned for each other in byelections, and the two of them share similar philosophies about prioritizing stimulus spending on infrastructure ahead of eliminating the deficit. (And should the Ontario Liberals ultimately lose power, one wonders whether the federal party would remain excited about a big spending platform in 2015.)

Standing aside from all this is Mr. Hudak, presumably happy to have Mr. Harper echo his criticisms of the pension plan and bemused by the back-and-forth between Ms. Wynne and Ms. Horwath over which of their parties was responsible for the delayed setup of the Financial Accountability Office, the first real parry and thrust of this campaign.

Eventually, though, it should crystallize around the larger questions of what kind of government voters want to elect. Will it be the force for good that Ms. Wynne envisions? Or, as she said of the Prime Minister, one that gets out of the way?

Mr. Hudak has been betting on the latter since not long after he lost the 2011 election. He has until June 12 to close the deal.